ISTANBUL — No one ever said they weren’t anything but smart and clever here.

They knew coming in, because the working group report last spring from the International Olympic Committee said so, that transport issues are — and will be — problematic in a city growing so fast it’s hard to keep up.

ISTANBUL — There once was a time, and candidly it was not all that long ago, when if you said, “Turkey,” referring to the country, not Thanksgiving, the reference that not infrequently came to the minds of many might well have been the Oscar-winning movie “Midnight Express,” depicting American Billy Hayes’ time in an infamous Turkish prison, caught trying to smuggle two kilos of hashish at the Istanbul airport.

In some ways, Istanbul now is as it was when Hayes was here. As it ever may be. When the sun rises over the hills, it reveals the beauty of mosques and minarets reaching toward the sky. Several times a day, the cry to prayer still beckons the faithful.

MADRID — Despite the economic hammering this country has taken, an International Olympic Committee survey indicates 76 percent of local residents want the 2020 Summer Olympics and 81 percent throughout Spain, the Madrid 2020 bid team saying at a Tuesday evening news conference that such figures show the Games offer a measure of hope to a city and country that wants and needs it.

The poll numbers stayed relatively even from from IOC survey results released last May, which showed 78 percent support for the Games in Madrid and the surrounding area. That polling remained consistent, even as the Spanish economy remains mired in recession, Spain’s second in three years, with the nation’s unemployment rate at one in four, is proof indeed of the power of the Olympic spirit, bid leaders asserted.

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Alan Abrahamson is an award-winning sportswriter, best-selling author and in-demand television analyst. In 2010, he launched his own website, 3 Wire Sports, described in James Patterson and Mark Sullivan's 2012 best-selling novel Private Games as "the world's best source of information about the [Olympic] Games and the culture that surrounds them."